“It Was Gone Overnight”

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“It Was Gone Overnight” - Slate

One restaurant’s struggle to weather the pandemic.

Eric Wang first noticed something was wrong on March 9. It was a Monday morning, and the co-owner of Thamee, a Burmese restaurant in D.C. that had just been named a semifinalist for the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant, was doing his routine count of reservations for that evening. Usually, the number of bookings will rise between Sunday night and Monday morning, as guests making last-minute dinner plans sign up for tables online. On March 9, Wang saw the reservations drop by half overnight.

Many restaurants operate on wafer-thin margins, with little financial cushion to sustain the business through prolonged periods of diminished income. Thamee, which opened in May 2019 and made the Washington Post’s list of best restaurants of that year, was no different. The restaurant had only just completed its first five straight weeks of profitability when those reservation cancellations started rolling in. Like many new restaurants, Thamee was still in debt, with just about one month’s worth of rent and one pay period’s worth of wages on hand. Wang, 39, and his Thamee co-owners—Simone Jacobson, 35, and her Burma-born mother, 67-year-old executive chef Jocelyn Law-Yone—had to act quickly to avoid bleeding money on hourly staffers who might show up at the restaurant to find empty tables and not enough work to do.
 
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